On Thursday afternoon, I was let into the prison and went to draw a set of education keys. There were none left and I thought, OK, I'll manage. Then Syd stopped me and gave me a good bollocking. "You can't do that," he said. "How can that be safe?"

Syd is one of the officers, about my age, shrewd, very experienced. Syd knew where my classroom was and he knew that for at least part of the afternoon I would be locked in there with the guys. It was essential in his view that I had the means to get myself and the students out of the room in the event of an incident or an emergency.

So I went back, made a bit of a fuss and was given keys from another group. I was very pleased to have Syd looking out for me. It's easy for a bleeding-heart liberal like me to forget this is a prison, all too easy for me to be seduced by what goes on in my classroom. After all, I get the guys who can't wait to talk about the romantic poets or compare productions of Macbeth; someone has to rub my nose in the fact that these chaps are not altogether typical and that when someone new starts in the class, well, they could have done God knows what.

Syd dropped in to see me again halfway through the afternoon, just to make sure.

"It was Syd got me in touch with my daughter again," said Malky. "I'd lost touch, not heard from her in years, then, out of the blue, I got a letter. She'd tracked me down. I didn't know what to do. Very scary; she's grown up now. I was thinking, she'll see through me, no problem. I went to the phone, picked it up, put it down, walked away, walked back, picked it up, put it down. I didn't realise it but Syd was watching me from the office and he called me in. 'It's your daughter isn't it?' he said.

"I was standing there, like a wee kid with my head down. 'Go to that bloody phone and phone her now. Go on, do it or I'll nick you.' 'Nick me for what?' 'Being a twat. Now go and phone her'."

"Phoned her, then, did you?" said Kev.

"Yeah. I just said, 'It's your Dad' and we were away."

Kev picked up a book and shook it at me. "WB Yeats, any good, is he?"

"Yeats? He's the best there is," I told Kev, and we made a start on The Second Coming. It blew them away and me with them, and the last thing on any of our minds was jail. The poem led us on to talking about religion, and Kev smiled and said: "This Easter will be the last big festival I spend in jail."

"That's definite, is it?" I asked him, "you'll be gone before Christmas?"

"Yep, I can go to mass on the out this Christmas."

Kev is an altar boy. His Christianity leaves me a little bit bemused and I always have a bit of a go at him about the rackety life he's had. He always explains that without his religion he would have been infinitely worse. "Keeps you in check, does it?" "Sure does," he tells me, without a breath of irony.

At break, the three Nigerian guys from the Friday philosophy class dropped by to tell me about Wole Soyinka giving the Reith lectures. Then Robert got back from his OU tutorial, Jason arrived from gym and the Nigerians shook hands all round and headed back to the computer room. We took a look at An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. The guys were fascinated by the sheer deadly recklessness in the poem. Their own careers as warriors led them straight to "A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds."

"You've been there, have you?" asked Kev. "When you think, this is it I'm gonna die?"

"Yeah," said Malky, "and you just think, well, fuck it." Every head in the room nodded, except mine.

At the end of the afternoon I saw Syd in the staff room. He was still on at me. "You have to get things right," he said, "remember where you are."